That’s one frustrating thing about the top 100: how little of it is available to the public. There is only a single volume in print sampling George Herriman’s […]
How can you tell that a graphic novel is going to be terrible? One very clear sign: if the name of the person who drew it does not […]
It’s not much of a secret that basically all new comics are out there in the ether in digital form within a day or two of hitting the […]
Modernism came late to comics. Cartoonists are naturally stylistic chameleons, selecting and altering visual techniques to serve their subjects. But explicitly presenting style as content? That’s always trickier.
I worked in a comic book store in the mid-’80s and loathed the customers who came up to the counter with their own plastic bags and acid-free cardboard […]
New mainstream comics about anything other than superheroes aren’t entirely obsolete, but they’re definitely anomalies; if there are three war comics running at the same time, it’s like […]
There is no way of getting around it: if you are going to look honestly at American comics, you are going to encounter superheroes. The spandex wall is […]
Unsurprisingly, the maleness of comics culture has been self-perpetuating: if reading (or collecting) comics is understood as “something that guys do,” then the woman in the comics store […]
The world of comic book readers is an insular world, and it’s also an annoying male world. The archetypal comics store employee – think of The Simpsons‘ Comic […]
The language of comics criticism is still young and scrawny – it’s so underdeveloped that there’s no good adjective that means “comics-ish”.